Medicine is Not a Luxury Trade


"Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism... Let us say to the people not 'How much have you got?' but 'How best can we serve you?'" 
—Norman Bethune

Doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel thrive better in public universal health care systems because they are not strapped for time, and because they don't inherently want to operate by doing what's simplest for them, by taking shortcuts, and by constantly living in fear of facing lawsuits. Where are they pushed into operating in such a way that is anti-human and goes against ethics in medicine? In privatized health care systems, bastions of Neoliberalism, if ever, such as those seen in the United States. Profit-driven health care does not come with the right to privacy, dignity, and reasonable bodily autonomy, always lacking sufficient funding in providing a variety of options for patients. In public universal health care, medical personnel are not only paid well, but quality comes first; and while doctors and nurses are by no means always "perfect" (they are not infallible), medical malpractice -- by the very strong definition of the term -- is not an epidemic. 

Then again, Neoliberalism is the higher stage of privatization and deregulation which involves rolling back state intervention in the economy. Is it any wonder why the anti-vaxxer movement, infamous for spreading wild misinformation, is out of control and receiving an excess in funds from Hollywood celebrity endorsers such as Jenny McCarthy? Thanks to the out-of-control anti-vaxxer movement, of which the United States seems to be the epicenter of, the measles has been making a world comeback in recent years, which is alarming considering how so close it came to being eradicated.

Advocating for universal health care is hardly 'radical', even in Cuba which has some of the best doctors in the world. But how incredible is it that the United States, which has Dollar supremacy and holds a monopoly over the global markets, seems to have this extreme and irrational fear of universal health care? Even some of the poorest Third World nations have public universal health care, because it is probably the most basic of basic necessities that one can have. 

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